Here’s something nice from BlackMoon’s team. We were experimenting with Away3D and we were in need of some nice 3D model to use in our playground. So – we’ve created a very nice, low-poly dinosaur and make some walking animation to use in Away3D. Click here to play with our dinosaur. Since we’re rather nice folks we figured out that we’ll share both the model and our Away3D experiment – if you’re interested – go ahead and download the files here. (it’s free to use for personal and commercial projects btw.).

Ecards were made for JouluKirkko.fi (Finnish Church) and Valto.fi (Finninsh Children Parliment).

Some of the cards are funny, some of them are relaxed and peaceful – we had a really good time doing those short flash animations. Each eCard is different and we need to aproach each with different idea.

Please feel free to check them:

JouluKirkko ecards

Valto ecards

Some screenshots:

JouluKirkko ecards

Valto ecards

Meet Jo&Mo.

Those two nice criminals will do their time helping you understand the way the walking is done in animation.
There are several ways how to animate a walking person – I’ll try to cover them all.
Let’s start with ways that are very easy to create, yet provide good result.

no 1 – the Ministry of Silly Walks

Sometimes there’s no time for complex animation, or budget for the cartoon is too short – in such cases animator needs to find a way to create a walking without spending a whole week on it. The good way is to create parody of the walking animation. You’ll feel that the character is walking, but the whole animation could be quite simple.

Example:
Mo is trying to sneak undetected. He makes a lot of small, fast steps – but the trick is that his lengs don’t bent at all.

View Animation

How it’s made:
You need just a torso and two different legs.

Remember to make position of the legs opposite (when left is up, right is down).

no 2 – the Yogi bear style

Remember old H&B cartoon with Yogi the Bear? There was a very nice, and very easy walk animation technique in which legs aren’t moving – just go underneath the torso.

Example:

View Animation

How it’s made:
You just need to copy&paste two legs from previous scene and make quite monstrous “leg cross”

Now you just need to spin it beneath the torso. (this is good for characters with small legs and big torsos)

no 3 – the fake “Hard Way”

You would need some kind of walk cycle reference for it. The best I know is made by Preston Blair and can be found in a book “Animation – How to Draw Animated Cartoons“.
You can also download if from here.
So – when you’ll have the reference, Joe will show you how we can have pretty good effects with minimal effort.

Example:

View Animation

How it’s made:
The tip is to divide the leg into three parts – and create motion tween accordingly to the walk cycle.

The result is nice, but could be better.

no 4 – the real Hard Way

If you would like to try the real thing – here’s how to do the old school frame-by-frame animation.

Example:

View Animation

How it’s made:
No shortcuts here – you need to manually draw each stage of walk (although in flash you just need to animate the legs that way – the rest could be done by using MovieClips for torso, arms and legs). The walk cycle reference would be your biggest friend while doing this.

To position all the frames – you can use flash Onion View mode.

The result depends mainly on how much you focused on drawing (mine could be better – but at the other hand it took me about 10 minutes to draw it).

Hope you liked it:)
If you would like to know more – you can download all the .fla files for learning purposes.

Animation was used as Easter ecard – a very nice one:)

click here to see the animation

animation screenshot

Cartoons demonstrate how to use the Graphcard service and what are the benefits.

We’ve designed “the Graphcard Duck”, who plays the major role in all the cartoons.

cartoons’ screenshots

It has humorous cartoony style, but the message stays very clear and sharp – “we can help you with your rubbish”.

We’ve also made online booking system – so user are able to request the service in chosen time and place.

The site has it’s own character – Mr.Garbageguy – who is a “host” of the site. There’s also short animated intro depicting company’s services (with Mr.Garbageguy of course).

site screenshot

intro screenshot

We’ve shown brand history and brand target group – and how those point affected new package design.

We’ve also created music for the presentation.

 presentation screenshots